Solid State drives are definitely one of the hottest computer products in the market now. And every day it just feels like they are getting more affordable for consumers to buy them. As we all know with technology and time, products that were once expensive are much cheaper after a period of time. Not only are they cheaper, but they work a lot faster and better than their previous models. All the first gen SSDs really did not have much more read and write speeds faster than a normal hard drive. However, the increase in boot time was very attractive since there was no need for spin up time like original mechanical hard drive. Enthusiasts would use a 30 to 40 GB SSD to boot their computer and have a normal hard drive for storage. The only drawback was that there was not much longevity for the SSD since the free space left over was becoming smaller and smaller due to other extra files (windows update, internet cache, hidden files, etc…). This worked quite well until companies started focusing on increasing the size, speed, and integrity of these drives simultaneously.
Nowadays we can see 90-120 GB SSDs with amazing transfer rates, safety options, longer life times, and affordable prices. The product that I will be reviewing today is more on the business end since it comes with extra features to really protect the integrity of your information. But, it should be noted it’s still pretty affordable in terms of the price of SSDs. Kingston has come out with their SSDNow KC100 120GB SSD drive that blows away the competition. It’s fast, sleek, simple, and will definitely protect your information should your drive fail. Let’s take a look and see what comes inside the box of this amazing SSD.
Package Contents
- Kingston SSDNOW KC100 120GB SSD
- 2.5’’ USB Enclosure
- 3.5’’ Brackets and Mounting Screws
- SATA Power and Data Cable
- Hard Drive Cloning Software with Installation Guide
Now I haven’t heard much about their RAISE technology but so far I can deduce that it caters to reducing error bit rates from SSDs. The one consistent way to prevent drive failure is to make sure the drive not have too many data error reads. And this is exactly what this technology target. RAISE will definitely allow your SSD to run smoothly and efficiently while you work or play the night away.
KC100 Performance
The performance of this SSD is just amazing. I tested various SSDs and a regular hard drive in order to gauge just how much faster this drive is compared to others. There are other SSDs with faster speeds that I could have tested with but I wanted to show a comparison of basically regular hard drives, first gen SSDs, second gen SSDs, and current SSDs.
The tests above clearly show the difference between SSDs nowadays and SSDs back then. It was amazing fast with large files and large quantities of small files as well. And with the added data protection that comes with the Kingston SSDNow KC100 120GB SSD, it will be a tough competitor to beat.
Now the biggest reason for getting an SSD for your computer, boot up time. For most people they know that there computer boots up pretty slow with a regular hard drive. I clocked mine at around 2 minutes and 6 seconds. This could be different for laptops and netbooks but for desktops that time I think is pretty reasonable. Looking at the scores below its easy to see that there is just no comparison between a hard drive and an SSD. But, this test shows that higher transfer rates in SSDs did not increase boot up times. We roughly got around the same time for the Intel SSD and Kingston SSD. It really wasn’t that far off. The extra transfer speeds help when loading applications and transferring files, but does not aid the boot up time too significantly.